Resensie: Life of PI by Yann Martel

Life of PI



The novel is a work of fiction set in the summer of 1977 that draws on places and historical events in India. The story starts in Pondicherry, a former French colony in India.


Piscine Molitor "Pi" Patel is the narrator and protagonist of the novel. He was named after a swimming pool in Paris, despite the fact that neither his father nor his mother particularly liked swimming. The story is told as a narrative from the perspective of a middle-aged Pi, now married and with his own family, and living in Canada. At the time of main events of the story, he is sixteen years old. He recounts the story of his life and his 227-day journey on a lifeboat when his ship sinks in the middle of the Pacific Ocean during a voyage to North America.


Life of Pi is divided into three sections. In the first section, the main character, Pi, an adult, reminisces about his childhood. He was named Piscine Molitor Patel after a swimming pool in France. He changes his name to "Pi" when he begins secondary school, because he is tired of being taunted with the nickname "Pissing Patel". His father owns a zoo in Pondicherry, providing Pi with a relatively affluent lifestyle and some understanding of animal psychology.

Pi is raised a Hindu, but as a fourteen-year-old he is introduced to Christianity and Islam, and starts to follow all three religions as he "just wants to love God." He tries to understand God through the lens of each religion and comes to recognize benefits in each one.

Eventually, his family decides to sell their zoo over a land dispute with the government, and sell the animals to various zoos around the world before emigrating to Canada. In the second part of the novel, Pi's family embarks on a Japanese freighter to Canada carrying some of the animals from their zoo, but a few days out of port, the ship meets a storm and capsizes, resulting in his family's death. During the storm, Pi escapes death in a small lifeboat with a spotted hyena, an injured zebra, and an orangutan.

As Pi strives to survive among the animals, the hyena kills the zebra, then the orangutan, much to Pi's distress. At this point, it is discovered that a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker had been hiding under the boat's tarpaulin; it kills and eats the hyena. Frightened, Pi constructs a small raft out of flotation devices, tethers it to the boat, and retreats to it. He delivers some of the fish and water he harvests to Richard Parker to keep him satisfied, conditioning Richard Parker not to threaten him by rocking the boat and causing seasickness while blowing a whistle. Eventually, Richard Parker learns to tolerate Pi's presence and they both live in the boat.

Pi recounts various events while adrift, including discovering an island of carnivorous algae inhabited by meerkats. After 227 days, the lifeboat washes up onto the coast of Mexico and Richard Parker immediately escapes into the nearby jungle.

In the third part of the novel, two officials from the Japanese Ministry of Transport speak to Pi to ascertain why the ship sank. When they do not believe his story, he tells an alternate story of human brutality, in which Pi was adrift on a lifeboat with his mother, a sailor with a broken leg, and the ship's cook, who killed the sailor and Pi's mother and cut them up to use as bait and food. Parallels to Pi's first story lead the Japanese officials to believe that the orangutan represents his mother, the zebra represents the sailor, the hyena represents the cook, and Richard Parker is Pi himself.


Review by Justine Jordan for The Guardian

In the author's note that prefaces this vertiginously tall tale, Yann Martel blends fact and fiction with wily charm. Yes, he'd published two books that failed to shake the world – eager, studious-young-man's fiction with a strain of self-conscious experimentalism – and taken off to India nursing the faltering seeds of another. But no, he didn't there meet a wise old man who directed him to a putative "main character", now living back in Martel's native Toronto: a certain Piscine Molitor or Pi Patel, named for a French swimming pool and nicknamed for an irrational number, who in the mid-1970s survived 227 days lost at sea with a Royal Bengal tiger.









Sluit by ons aan

Klik hier om lid te word van die Sentrum vir Eietydse Spiritualiteit. Word per e-pos in kennis gestel en kry afslag op dagkonferensies, kursusse, boeke, DVD's ens.

DVD: Saam op soek na God

Saam op soek na God

Gewone mense en bekendes word gevra om oor hulle oortuigings en geloof te praat. Vrae soos: Wie is God vir jou?
Het jy enige bewyse van God se bestaan? Ons het gelowiges tot ateïste, new agers tot wikka hekse gaan vra. Die DVD kos R130 maar vir Sentrum (SES) lede net R110.

Stuur vir ons 'n brief

Ons stel belang in jou reaksie en kommentaar op enige gegewe artikel en jou denke rondom die soeke na eietydse spiritualiteit. Besoek asb. hierdie bladsy vir meer inligting.


Kopiéreg © spiritualiteit.co.za